Arild Nilsen, Vice President Millom Tech, Telenor Digital explains how TM Forum's Open APIs extend the digital reach of telcos, enabling the integration with third parties that provides customers with a seamless online experience.
Ailis Claassen
02 Nov 2021
My API Story: Seamless customer experience
Arild Nilsen, Vice President Millom Tech, Telenor Digital, explains how TM Forum's Open APIs extend the digital reach of telcos, enabling integration with third parties to provide customers with a seamless online experience.
Tell us about yourself and your job
I have a background in IT and Telecommunications spanning 35+ years. Most of my career has been in various roles in software development, such as developer roles, tech lead, CTO and now managing a team of developers and being the product owner of the Millom platform.
During those years I have learnt that building software is as much about people as technology. Setting up teams that are supportive to each other, freely communicate ideas and document their designs in ways that can be used and reused is vital to produce results. In this respect, well documented and easy to use APIs play an important role.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?
Because it is an honest effort to define reusable Open APIs that can be utilized across many vendors and op-co’s in the industry.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company?
We are at the exploratory stage of finding APIs that we can standardize on when doing ‘south bound’ integration from the Millom platform towards mobile network operators (MNOs).
We are looking into using the TMF 910 Self Care API Component Suite with the following APIs: getId (TMF691 - wrapping an OpenID Connect authorization), getAccountInfo (TMF666), getUserProducts (TMF637), getUsageReport (TMF677), getOffers (TMF620) and subscribeToOffer (TMF622). In addition, we are currently also exploring the TMF717 Customer 360 APIs as an alternative.
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs?
These are the APIs that we have found that are the best match with the information elements required by the use-cases supported by the Millom Platform.
How do you use those APIs?
The APIs are used to support the Millom use-cases of providing self-care and data plan upsell in third party digital channels (e.g. Facebook, the Android OS, etc). Technically these are (1) retrieving a subscriber’s current account status with monetary and remaining data balances, (2) obtaining plans that can be presented to the subscriber as purchase offers and lastly (3) activation of a plan towards the subscriber current monetary balance. In short, the combination of this enables the subscribers to interact directly with their telco operator from within their favorite app and services. Extending the telcos digital reach and providing seamless customer experience online.
How have you benefited from using these APIs?
If we are able to standardize on these APIs in the MNO integrations, it will ease both the technical feasibility phase and the technical integration process. In the feasibility process using standard APIs will make communication with the technical teams of the MNOs easier, and in the technical integration we can benefit from having off the shelf connectors with no or little need for bespoke development efforts.
Where do you use them?
We plan to use these interfaces towards any MNOs that support or are willing to support the said APIs. The Millom Platform is targeting the entire global market, so there are no restrictions to which mobile operators or regions this can be applicable.
Have you used them in conjunction with any other APIs?
While these APIs are to be used in the integration layer between the Millom Platform, the ‘northbound interfaces’ will be APIs defined by or developed in cooperation with service providers.